PhD INPhINIT “la Caixa” fellowship on 3D digitization of paintings

Submitted by gharo on 21 December, 2016 - 15:25

Topic: 3D digitization of paintings

The main goal of this project is to develop a low-cost and universal technique to digitize paintings with high quality, high resolution, and augmented with 3D information. The only physical requirement is a commodity camera. We will also study the potential use of smartphones and tablets. No special and controlled illumination setting will be required nor the presence of a professional photographer. Lately, there is a highly interest and necessity of digitizing art pieces and this interest will persist in the future. On one hand, the art experts and professionals need high quality digital reproductions of art pieces for different purposes such as documentation, diffusion, conservation and future restoration. On the other hand, the rest of the society may also benefit from a cheap digitizing tool in order to digitize their favorite paintings or even their personal creations, either for their personal use or for publishing it on the internet and thus promoting the universal access to art. Currently, there exist different options for digitizing art paintings but all of them involve qualified personnel, professional equipment and a controlled and special illumination setting for capturing the images. Thus, they are not affordable to the average citizen or a small museum. None of them contains 3D information and sometimes are limited to indoor scenarios. This project continues the previous work by the team members already published in [1,2]. The research aspects are related to image processing and computer vision. The technique to be developed will automatically fuse all the input photographs taken by the user in order to get a final image with high quality and high resolution, free from artifacts like highlights and shadows and with 3D information so as to make possible to interactively change the viewpoint when visualizing it.